Big Bang scientist ‘planned to blow up oil refinery in terror attack that would wipe out city the size of London’

By Peter Allen and Nabila Ramdani
Last updated at 5:54 PM on 13th October 2009

A nuclear scientist turned Al Qaeda agent was targeting a Total Oil refinery in a bid to cause an explosion which would have destroyed a city ‘the size of London’, it emerged today.

Adlene Hicheur , 32, also compiled a ‘wish list’ of senior European politicians as ‘assassination targets’ including French president Nicolas Sarkozy and the country’s interior minister Brice Hortefeux.

Hicheur is currently on remand in Paris after being charged on Monday afternoon with ‘criminal activities related to a terrorist group’.

Well, finally the Hollywood ideal has become the real scenario where terrorism is concerned. A scientist who worked at the LHC was evidently planning on bombing large oil facilities etc in a plot that would rival 9/11… In the EU that is. The alleged plan he had in mind would devastate an area the size of London one claim makes.

In any case, we are starting to see the paradigm shift here and people should be paying attention. No longer are we just dealing with unschooled madrassa programmed kids and wanna be’s. We are starting to see more and more guys who are like Mohammad Atta. Educated and completely and utterly bent on doing destruction to others for their God.

Today details of the ‘brilliant and solitary’ physician’s sinister plans were made public by security sources who have been collecting evidence against him for the past year-and-a-half during a surveillance operation.

During that time he was using a pseudonym on the Internet as he corresponded with leading members of Al Qaeda’s notorious North African unit.

Money transfers had already taken place between the two, as a plan was concocted to target Total, the multinational oil company which operates in most European countries including Britain and France.

There had also been an exchange of ‘technical expertise’, with the young boffin offering his considerable scientific know-how.

However, Adlene had ruled out any possibility of acting as a suicide bomber, insisting that a kamikaze attack would be less effective than a more conventional one.

So there you have it. Scientific know how that could have potentially really made for a big bang (no pun intended.. Ok, maybe a little) This guy was definitely smarter than the average shaheed though. He had no plans to do himself in just yet with a bomb vest. Instead he wanted to remote det something big.

Of course all of the headlines make him out to be a nuclear scientist. Really, he may know about nuclear theory but he was at CERN looking for the Higgs Boson! C’mon! Nope, he certainly could have planned and carried out a big attack, but he was caught. Caught mind you even though he was using a pseudonym online etc. Likely he was not a master mind enough to be using TOR for his transmissions….

It’s also interesting to note that he was in contact with the Algerian Maghreb. These are the same guys who had that little incident with the plague last year. These guys are on the edge and of all the Qaida out there, seem to be the ones on the move where bigger attacks using CBRN are concerned.